A Non-Gamers Guide To: League of Legends

I may be very late to this particular band wagon, seeing as this game was actually released in 2009, but I have only really just discovered the strange joy that is League of Legends.

The Background 

For those who don't know the history of the game, allow me to explain briefly. League of Legends is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) PC game which is inspired by a modded map created for Warcraft III called Defence of the Ancients. You can clearly see the Real Time Strategy breading of this game, as it is all controlled by pointing and clicking toward objectives, then pointing and clicking until you either kill a minion or a rival Champion.

The first thing to draw me to this game, other than the constant references made to it by YouTubers and the like, was the array of Champions you can control. Although this was very much an RTS at heart, in League of Legends you only control 1 unit: Your Chosen Champion. This is probably the strongest part of the game for me. Riot Games have put so much effort into not only making these characters balanced in game and aesthetically pleasing, the amount of effort which has gone into each of the Champions back stories and reasons for being in the League is quite frankly Tolkien-esque.  Each Champion had a lovingly crafter lore which leads to them being chosen to fight on the Fields of Justice, and that detail lead me to look further into this game.

What also astounded me about the game, with all its detail, voice acted characters and beautiful graphics, is that it is free-to-play. With the amount of content in this game that is amazing. If only other games could be so kind.

My Personal Experience 

My first worry I had with the game is that the laptop I have is, to put it bluntly, old and crappy. After seeing many people's videos on YouTube, I thought it would just burn out and never work. This is why I am surprised to say that not only did my trusty laptop not blow up immediately (which is evident while I'm typing this for you), the game also runs relatively smoothly as well. Sure, when there's a lot of shit happening on screen it does tend to chug like a struggling steam engine, but it's not too bad as long as you get out of there with your life.

Once the game was working only one thing disappointed me about the game: That not all Champions are unlocked for you to play at once. I know this is a petty thing to bring up, and also this system does stop people from just choosing the best characters immediately and ransacking every game, but when you've made a list of Champions you want to try out and you find you can't use any of them until you have collected enough IP. The way you unlock these Champions is with Influence Points (IP) which you gain through playing games. A very clever system of progression I feel. The other way to buy these characters is
through Riot Points (RP) which are bought with your real money. RP is also the only way to buy new skins and such for your Champions, also a good way of running a free to play game.

With this knowledge, I went into my first game not knowing what to expect. PvP? Not to start with, are you nuts!? I've seen people play this game before, they'd rip me a new asshole in two minutes. So, with that irrational fear of people killing me in a video game, I went into a Player vs AI game, where bots call kill me instead. As a modern gamer who likes to wade into the action immediately, there's a lot of things you have to learn to Play League of Legends:
1) Just because your character has a sword and is classified as a 'melee' fighter, doesn't mean he will beat others in combat - Do you want to know how many games I played before I got my first Champion kill? Five. Five games of going zero for fifteen made me grateful this wasn't a Team Death Match style of play.
2) When it comes to Fight or Flight, Flight makes a lot more sense - Whenever you die, your respawn time increases, so its better to hang back and replenish your health at the beginning rather than waiting forty seconds to get back into the action.
With these words of wisdom from, well, a noobish idiot, you may survive and do better than I do.

Once I had amassed enough IP to unlock my first owned Champion, I was unsure who to pick. So, obviously, I went for the one who looked both cool and had the coolest looking attacks. This lead me to Fiddlesticks, a scarecrow looking fellow who fires crows at people while holding a bad-ass scythe. This character taught me another important lesson in League of Legends:
3) String together specials is the best way to get mad kills - I found that combining Terrify, which halts the enemy temporarily, with Crowstorm, a whirling avian vortex of death, got me far more Champion kills than mindlessly running in with Garren and twirling with my sword like a ballerina.

My Verdict 

In all, League of Legends is a really fun game to play, and it is a heap more fun with friends or good, friendly team mates. Although the learning curve in the early games is pretty steep and not having your own Champion at the beginning does suck, but after this period its an entertaining game which you are very likely to spend a lot of time playing.